1. SEO
  2. W3C Validation

What is W3C Validation and How it helps in SEO

W3C refers to the World Wide Web Consortium, which provides a validation service, named as the W3C Validation which checks the validity of the web documents by checking and verifying the codes of the web pages.

W3C Markup Validation Service

This although is not a full website check tool, but still, it confirms the technical specifications of the website by checking the language that the online machines understand.

With the minimal errors on the coding of the web pages, the site’s quality increases and this also changes the way a website appears to the visitors and search engines.

The validator service processes documents of many languages, most importantly HTML (through HTML 4.01) and XHTML (1.0 and 1.1) family, MathML, SMIL and SVG (1.0 and 1.1, including the mobile profiles). The validator needs to be confirming the language, which needs a declaration from the website.

Why validate a web page with W3C Validation?

It helps in debugging usually, the web browsers try to parse the worst code in the HTML pages, but some of the coding mistakes are such that can’t be parsed by the browsers. Here’s where the W3C validation helps, and debugs the website issues, mainly with the HTML codes.

Validation of the web pages even eases the maintenance of the websites, as if you try to maintain the same from the beginning stage of the site, the maintenance of the design is easier in the later stages.

How does the W3C Validation help in SEO?

The validation directly doesn’t affect the SEO and the search engine rankings, but there are a few coding issues that might sometime help in the rankings.

None of the SEO experts or webmasters takes the W3C validation as a part of the search engine optimization practice, but it is still said that some missing end quote or duplicate tag may cause a potential problem to the websites in the eyes of search engines.

In a survey, it was found that just around 5% of the entire web pages pass the W3C validation, still, most of the websites hold a strong position in the search result pages.

The W3C validation is not an SEO standard, but if your website is W3C validated, then the website would be easily crawled by the robots of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live etc. who check for the different alt attributes etc. while indexing the pages.

So, keep the fact in consideration that the correct HTML or respective coded pages help a lot in better indexing of the web pages in search engines, but minimal errors in the coding won’t affect much.